25,000 Europeans Will Die From Antibiotic Resistant Infections This Year

 

Is it just the beginning? This year, 25,000 people from the EU will will be fatally infected by untreatable infections. Several years ago the World Health Organization warned that the world risked returning to the pre-antibiotic era when infections did not respond to treatment. Apparently the warnings have been ignored as the current antibiotics have been broadly overused and are losing (or have lost) their effectiveness as the virus’s adapt.

Researchers speak of a “nightmare scenario” if the gene for NDM-1 production is spread more widely, a global ticking time-bomb.

In another example,

The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) said yesterday that in some countries up to 50 per cent of cases of blood poisoning caused by one bug – K. pneumoniae, a common cause of urinary and respiratory conditions – were resistant to carbapenems, the most powerful class of antibiotics.

The UK Health Protection Agency warned doctors last month to abandon a drug usually used to treat a common sexually transmitted disease because it was no longer effective. The agency said that gonorrhoea – which caused 17,000 infections in 2009 – should be treated with two drugs instead of one and warned of a “very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future.”

The world is being driven towards the “unthinkable scenario of untreatable infections”, experts are warning, because of the growth of superbugs resistant to all antibiotics and the dwindling interest in developing new drugs to combat them.

Source: The INDEPENDENT

A question is, when will the number of fatalities from untreatable infections begin a rapid parabolic move upward? When that day comes, it will be too late for an unthinkable number of people. Too late for new development of other antibiotics. The microbes will have won.

For those who are skeptical, please research the 1918 Flu Pandemic.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as “Spanish Flu” or “La Grippe” the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.

Source: Stanford University

A wide spread untreatable pandemic is something that none of us alive have ever experienced. Even when reading about other historic outbreaks, it doesn’t seem real, because it hasn’t happened to us. We cannot fully grasp the horror that must have permeated society during those ill times.

So for now, all we can do is be reasonably prepared as best we can. To stand a fighting chance against a pandemic with a high mortality rate, it will be essential to stay out of ‘public’ as much as possible. This will require a degree of self-isolation for as long as you can pull it off, until the pandemic has run its course. Any exposure to others will risk your own well being (depending of course on the type of transmission, mortality rate, etc.).

How then to prepare for pandemic?
Answer: Have enough food and supplies stashed away for the duration so you don’t have to go out in public. Have enough finances saved so you can pay the bills for the duration – and not have to go to work and risk being exposed (yes, you might lose your job, but you may also lose your life if you work during a fatal pandemic season).

In summary, the fact that we are being warned by the WHO and other health organizations that ‘SuperBugs’ are gaining ground, should be a wake up call for a vast world population that is way overdue for a terrible pandemic. I hope that it never comes to be, but I will prepare as though it is coming.

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